The biggest question surrounding Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a simple one: Who is Sadie Sink playing?
Ever since Sink’s casting was announced in 2025, fans have clamored to know what role she’d have in the MCU. Was she Gwen Stacy? Jean Grey? Rachel Summers? Marvel certainly wasn’t telling. Trailers revealed precious little of Sink’s performance, while Sink herself deftly parried any questions about her character throughout the film’s press run. Truly, all we know from Marvel is that Sink’s character “sits on a bench.” That’s it!
Now, though, the film is out, and we can finally dig into Sink’s role. Spoilers ahead, so this is your last chance to turn back if you want to experience the reveal in theaters.
Who is Sadie Sink in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?
To whoever guessed that Sink would be playing Jean Grey, congratulations! You were right on the money. Sink plays the beloved Marvel mutant, who is also Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s primary antagonist.
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In the X-Men comics and prior film adaptations, Jean is a powerful mutant gifted with telepathy and telekinesis. She’s also the host for the cosmic Phoenix Force, which, when corrupted, turns her into the Dark Phoenix. Versions of the Dark Phoenix saga have come to the big screen twice before, in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, with Famke Janssen in the role of Jean, and in 2019’s Dark Phoenix, with Sophie Turner in the role of Jean. (Between Turner and Sink, Marvel seems to love nothing more than casting stars of blockbuster shows with reviled final seasons as Jean.)
However, the Jean we meet in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is different from prior onscreen iterations. At the beginning of the film, she’s solely a telepath, one who’s able to hop through people’s minds and control their bodies. Her telepathic “jumps” have a distance limit, but over the course of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, she levels up severely, getting closer to the Jean power set people are more familiar with.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day leaves Jean’s future in the MCU open-ended. Notably, she’s not a member of the X-Men yet, because the X-Men don’t exist yet in the MCU’s prime universe. However, they do exist in the multiverse, and several of its members from the first set of Fox films will be making an appearance in Avengers: Doomsday, with Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming, and Rebecca Romijn all set to reprise their roles. Sink is not confirmed to appear in Avengers: Doomsday, but with so many X-Men in the mix, it can’t be long before the MCU tries its own hand at adapting the Dark Phoenix saga, right?
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters.
